Formally into terra incognita

Bon chance and buena suerte to researchers in France and Chile as they embark upon a joint exploration of The Great Taboo. After agreeing to collaborate in 2013, Chile’s government-sponsored Committee for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena (CEFAA) and a French NGO, the SIGMA2 Technical Commission, announced their “first working meeting” in Paris on Oct. 28-29. The following day, CEFAA chief Ricardo Bermudez and GEIPAN’s Xavier Passot, head of the official French research group, convened to offer their governments’ respective stamps of approval.

Not afraid to be counted — Chilean and French officials gather in Paris as a formal agreement to collaborate on UFO studies gets underway/CREDIT: 3AF/SIGMA2

First, a few definitions. We know about CEFAA, they’ve been around since 1997 by order of Chile’s civil aviation department. And we know about GEIPAN, the French agency that, as a branch of its space program, has been collecting UFO data under various acronyms and incarnations since 1977. GEIPAN assigns an A through D rating system to its UFO reports, with D being the truly puzzling cases without explanation. Some 20 percent of its 2,200 cases on file fall into the D file.

This part is news to De Void: SIGMA2 is a branch of 3AF, a private-sector technical society, the rough equivalent of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics here in the States. According to SIGMA2 Commission President Luc Dini, “We work with GEIPAN to look at ‘D’ cases … where GEIPAN has no special expertise to look further for explanation and causes. Since our role is not official, without direct involvement into the field investigation, we are focused on the analysis of physics and measurements … after the preliminary investigation.”

According to Dini, Chile has concluded UFOs, or UAP, or PAN in the preferred local parlace, pose a “potential aviation risk,” but CEFAA has no analytical component like SIGMA2. And that’s significant because, says Dini, CEFAA “wants to go beyond the investigation and attempt to scientifically explain the causes” of the phenomenon. If only they were a bit more ambitious … At any rate, Dini says SIGMA2 is not only eager to move forward, but that this “axis of cooperation” has “confirmed its intention to develop a network of scientific and technical expertise, in France, in Europe and outside Europe, to conduct physical case studies and discuss technical analysis.”

Clearly, one of those partners will be American, the nonprofit National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena. For 15 years, NARCAP has been assessing The Great Taboo’s potential for catastrophic air corridor encounters, despite being underfunded and underpublicized. Imagine what NARCAP could do with even a modest federal grant of, ohh, say, $307,524. That’s how much the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research are spending on their so-called “Sea Monkey study,” which concludes in February. The goal is to see if brine shrimp can be trained to swim with enough synchronization to affect a healthier circulation of ocean currents.

Sea Monkeys.

Anyhow, life goes on without Uncle Sam, and as Jose Lay confirms in an email to De Void, a lot of credit for what’s happening now goes to the foundation laid by the “Symposium on Official & Scientific Investigations of UAP (UFOs)” in North Carolina last year. An invited speaker and CEFAA official, Lay met with GEIPAN’s Passot during the two-day event, and “we exchanged information and agreed in principle to start formal cooperation between our entities.” Then they actually followed up on it. And the rest is history.

“I know from personal experience that the relationship of other governments to this issue is important to members of the U.S. government in terms of considering a new official involvement with this issue,” states author Leslie Kean, who played a key role in organizing the conference in Greensboro. “The fact that the two leading agencies in the world – one from Europe and the other from South America – are joining forces is extremely significant, and hopefully this step forward will help encourage our government to take the subject seriously and to join in the growing international effort.

“The U.S. role is important, because once the U.S. is on board – even by simply appointing one staffer to evaluate the validity of U.S. involvement – many other countries will come on board. Even a crack in this now shut door would be enough to radically change the picture. If we can simply assign a government appointee to evaluate the question — are UFOs worthy of investigation? — then we have made a giant step forward.”

Lay cited Kean and conference financier Kent Senter, who dropped a load on the symposium despite his struggle with cancer, for creating such a rational and productive climate. So yeah, some things do work out. And who knows, maybe they all will, eventually, if you’ve got the patience of a saint.

20 comments on “Formally into terra incognita”

@freeman69
I can count on you to keep me in line :). I use wiki all the time, but only on non-controversial subjects. It’s a good quick reference on facts, and some articles are very well done. The difficulty is in separating the wheat and the chaff. The ‘talk’ page is often a barometer of the degree of controversy. Note that teachers do not accept wiki entries as research.
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Quantum theory was a bee in the bonnet and a thorn in the side of the Machians, like Einstein (“…God doesn’t play dice with the world.”) By rejecting an aether (purely on experimental grounds), they restricted themselves to a particle-based reality…and remained upset by the pesky, yet not unreasonable, QM concepts like ’empty space’ wasn’t really empty after all.
The answer may lie in the IE paper of Donald Hotson (see http://www.infinite-energy.com/iemagazine/issue86/hotson.html). It contains part 3; the links for parts 1 & 2 are there, as well.
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Happy Holidays, everyone!
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I gotta go…

@Albert: Don’t be too harsh on Wikipedia. It’s given a hard time as it is. I’m betting the editors (the type of people who volunteer) are just trying to keep its image polished. And it is a valuable resource, in general.

On another note, I recently watched a program on TV over here in the UK about Quantum Mechanics. Apparently Albert Einstein had a decades long ‘discussion’ with Niels Bohr regarding the nature of reality. Einstein turned out to be wrong and the reality underpinning the world of atoms is very, very strange. If a robin navigates with a quantum compass, then what possibilities are open to future engineers?

Debunkers tend to be limited in their overview of reality because at the macroscopic level everything appears nice and logical, with easy-to-follow natural laws manifesting consistently. But that could just be the skin on the rice pudding, as Douglas Adams would have said. There’s still plenty of room at the bottom for technologies to be indistinguishable from ‘magic’ to us, even in our magnificent age of reason and comprehension.

@bendikorn
I can see why the the USAF was interested. Those were US made F4s. I can’t prove it, but it’s likely the ground radars were US made as well. The AF always collects data from other countries regarding its aircraft, and you can bet that those countries were quick to point out any problems with them. Some of those reports might make interesting reading (like the details on the previous aircraft radar ‘failures’). I wonder if F4 maker McDonnell Douglas has anything they could release? While I’m wishing for a horse, how about the maintenance records for the Minuteman launch control failures?
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The wiki on the 1976 Tehran incident is actually decent for the subject, but they fall into the same trap as everyone else: it must be mundane or ET, but never just ‘unidentified’. I love it when they use Klass as an ‘expert’, though. It shows how wikipedia is simply a regurgitation device for any information. Anyone with ‘credentials’, who yells louder, and is published, (and doesn’t piss off a wiki ‘editor’), is a source (and by extension, ‘expert’). There should be a note:
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“CAUTION, Useless for controversial subjects. Readers are encouraged to THINK FOR THEMSELVES”.
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If Stephen Bassett was ever right about anything, he was right about this: “[Wikipedia believes] …that collective ignorance is smarter than individual ignorance.”*
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* this concept has broad implications whenever any form of communication is conceived as propaganda, e.g. politics.

@Billy
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You had the patience of Job. To me, he just didn’t seem to be emotionally invested in his avocation, and takes the fun out of it. Perhaps if his posts were a little more entertaining…
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I gotta go…

How inspiring that these agencies are teaming up to sort through all the relavent evidence for extraterrestrials. They can start right here with what some experts claim is the best evidence ever produced for ET and UFOs…one accidental photo of 10 daylight UFOs has produced a lost alien code linking UFOs to each other and ancient artifacts winning a ton of press and TV reports…”UNSETTLING”- Los Angeles Times…http://www.orreman7.com/BestUFOphotoever.html

Despite the ending of Project Bluebook in the late 60’s, and with that the end of official investigation of the subject, there is good evidence that they have been interested after that. Take the 1976 Teheran UFO incident report found at the NSA website:

* Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
* Director, Joint Staff
* National Military Command Center
* Secretary of Defense
* Secretary of State
* CIA
* NSA
* White House
* Chief of Staff, Air Force
* Chief of Naval Operations
* Chief of Staff of the Army

Intelligence analysts wrote in the accompanying evaluation form:

“An outstanding report. This case is a classic which meets all the criteria necessary for a valid study of the UFO phenomenon:

a) the object was seen by multiple witnesses from different locations and viewpoints.
b) the credibility of many of the witnesses was high (an Air Force general, qualified air crews, and experienced radar operators).
c) visual sightings were confirmed by radar.
d) similar electromagnetic effects (EME) were reported by three separate aircraft.
e) there were physiological effects on some crew members (i.e. loss of night vision due to the brightness of the object).
f) an inordinate amount of maneuverability was displayed by the UFOs.”

@richard O’Connor
Sounds like you answered your own question. Just being facetious.
The mainstream media in America continue to wield considerable influence in their ongoing attempts to mold public opinion . Unfortunately in this day and age they(collectively as a group) seem more interested in protest movements and social causes- and could care less about devoting more attention to embolden elected government officials to appropriate more funds towards the scientific investigation of UAP(s).Unfortunately the MSM hold the cards here and their production administrators will never go anywhere near covering this topic.

This is welcome news to (finally) hear of some international cooperation in the serious and long-overdue scientific study of the UAP/UFO phenomenon. Hopefully this small coalition will serve as a nidus of growth and encourage more nations to get on-board and on-task with scientific research of this important UAP enigma. Perhaps this will also help to bring down the wall of denial about this very real UAP phenomenon and allow more professional scientists around the world to seriously engage with “The Great Taboo”. I wonder which country will be the last to get on-board, if we ever do?

This is positive news. Cooperation is the most important step, because it has to happen first.
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Still, I can’t help thinking about the marginalization of the UFO topic here in the US. Other countries don’t seem to have such an extreme phobia about it, but then again, the US is unusual in many ways. Have our governmental agencies completed scientific investigations into the phenomenon and have already reached their conclusions? Did they just dismiss the whole thing as BS? Not very scientific. Those agencies and the military seem happy with the present state of affairs.
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Maybe if they keep their fingers crossed, the whole thing will go away.
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Perhaps someday, every country in the world will be part of a UFO Investigation Committee, and…[insert your own punchline here].
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I gotta go..